File:Solidarity with Assange Demonstration at Piccadilly Circus.jpg

English: On Saturday 5 February 2022, I went to meet and photograph some of the activists staging their weekly protest at Piccadilly Circus against the continued detention and extradition proceedings against whistleblower and dissident journalist Julian Assange.

Nearly two weeks earlier on Monday 24 January, the High Court had made its decision regarding whether Julian Assange' could request an appeal hearing on his extradition case at Britain's Supreme Court. As Julian Assange's fiancée, Stella Morris, left the building she smiled briefly, an immediate indication that there was at least some good news. She then gave a brief speech to a crowd of supporters and the press -

'Make no mistake,' she declared, 'We won today in court,' but then added, 'but let's not forget that every time we win, as long as this case is not dropped, as long as Julian is not freed, Julian continues to suffer.'

While Assange's defence team were granted the right to apply for a hearing at the Supreme Court, it will be up to Britain's highest court to decide whether to agree to consider his case. That decision on a possible Supreme Court hearing is expected sometime in the next two to three months.

Unfortunately, the remit of the appeal has been restricted to examining the United States' claimed legal promises on how Assange will be treated, rather than to the wider issues of freedom of speech, the CIA plot to assassinate him, the extent to which the evidence against him has obviously been fabricated or as to whether his treatment in Belmarsh Prison has amounted to torture.

On the last point, it is interesting to note that UN special rapporteur for torture, Nils Melzer, has already declared that the conditions Assange has been forced to endure at Belmarsh prison, including prolonged periods of solitary, constitute both arbitrary detention and torture.

If convicted in the United States on the charges of espionage for exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as other wrongdoing by the United States and other governments, he faces up to 175 years in prison.

A week after Britain's High Court decision Assange was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his fight for democracy by Martin Sonnenborn, a German MEP.